Playwright Peter Nichols explores, in a unique personal memoir of the Second World War, the strange, chilling, now almost comical recordings of the Nazi swing band, Charlie and his Orchestra, perhaps the oddest-ever surviving examples of black propaganda.

Nichols was a teenager in Bristol during the Second World War, listening to the wireless, always eager to hear the latest swing music.

At that time the airwaves also carried attempts from Germany to undermine the morale of the British: talks by William Joyce, the so-called Lord Haw-Haw, and recordings of Charlie and his Orchestra, a swing band put together by the Nazis -- ironically, since they regarded swing music as decadent and utterly deplorable -- with re-written lyrics to well known songs of the day.

MUSIC & FACTUAL

Broadcast on Radio 3 in May 2005